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Hitting the high notes

12 January 2002

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

IF THE manic twittering of your neighbourhood birds is driving you mad, try
moving to an area with shorter trees. The speed at which some birds sing depends
on how high they perch, with each song perfectly designed to be heard clearly at
a particular height.

Erwin Nemeth at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative
Ethology in Vienna and his colleagues studied five species of Venezuelan ant
bird living in the Surumoni rainforest. Different species habitually perch at
different heights, and the team found that the songs vary in tempo—birds
living closest to the ground sing …